Also is it true that Africa was underdeveloped vs European and Asian contemporaries prior to colonialism? I think there were some relatively substantial empires and we have perhaps fooled ourselves into thinking they were backward savages to justify colonial rule.
Development is a nebulous term. African societies weren’t building oceanic armadas or smelting steel but they were making huge advances in mathematics and physics. Some African societies were larger and wealthier than contemporary European ones. But the western yardstick is to measure the development of a society by how many bombs and iPhones it produces per second. Same goes for pre-columbus American civilizations. South American societies were engaged in full-scale hydrological engineering and advanced animal husbandry and selective agriculture exceeding European development. North American societies were governing massive tracts of land and creating self-sustaining food forest ecosystems.
African societies weren’t building oceanic armadas or smelting steel
And yea, Egypt was Black at one point. You can’t really hide multi-ton stone sphinxes
Pretty good chance they reached America before Columbus as well, but just didn’t commit genocide
Africa is not a monolith. Neither is development. North Africa was pretty advanced if I recall correctly with people like Mansa Musa and there were very significant cultural and scientific developments in the Muslim world at the time. I think that Europeans had better armaments, armor, naval technology and possibly construction ability. However that is a result of Europe having more easily attainable iron and coal deposits, constant war and England being an island. African animals are also more or less impossible to domesticate (except camels and maybe zebras, but not really) and this gave Europeans a leg up in agriculture and prioritized urban development which in turn leads to ideas spreading faster and more technological development. I think a lot of the gap was due to Europe having more cities, which also allowed for biological warfare. Parts of Africa were incredibly wealthy and developed and parts more or less operated off sustenance farming.
Great Britain is an Island, England is part of that island. Sorry but i gotta point this out when i see fit, cause all of the countries that make up Great Britain played a part in its history, and it’s not fair to leave them out.
I would hazard a guess that the relative smallness of Europe played a factor as well. Less distance between all the major city-centers meant easier dissemination of ideas and trade.
This line of argument makes it seem like there is a set amount of city centers when the amount of city centers is a result of dense populations and urbanisation. The thing you need to look at is why there was no urbanisation to the same extent. Europe was in no way unique in this regard, India, China, Mexico and the Andean societies were at a similar level in the early modern era.
Looking at urbanisation as the ultimate point of a society and development is also kind of a pitfall of traditional eurocentric history writing.
The answer is complicated for the reasons others have said, but I like to explain it this way:
Advanced, peaceful aliens arrive at Earth in 1400 CE. They want to set up relations with earth but they are used to dealing with planets that have one planetary government, society, etc (just like Star Trek). They don’t quite know how to deal with such a fractured and diverse planet.
So these aliens decide to only meet with leaders from selected societies. They don’t have specific criteria but are generally looking at a whole host of factors we might broadly call “development”: education, metallurgy, governmental forms, material output, health & sanitation systems, etc.
The aliens would almost certainly choose to meet with reps from at least China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, North and West Africa, parts of the Arab world, and Tenochtitlan. Europe, outside of Byzantium and Al-Andalus, would have been completely bypassed. On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe. If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
Outside of North Africa (and some part of West Africa)… I don’t know much about comparing the rest of the continent to Europe. But I really don’t think they were much behind if at all.
If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
I wouldn’t pick any of those other options either though.
I don’t know why people always conflate civilization with resources.
Europeans even before 1492 probably had slightly better lives than the average Indian/Chinese/MENA person, simply because Europe has more land and the climate is easy-mode as fuck. It’s just that they didn’t invent anything.
Roman accounts prove that Northern Europeans had fairly good quality of life, judging purely by the height difference (today it’s only 1-2 inches, but was much bigger back then)
If I could go back to year 1400 and live out an 80 year lifespan, purely for the sake of enjoyment and not for altering history, it’d be North America no contest. South America or Africa second picks
The Byzantines were very seriously on the decline by 1400. Constantinople was a shadow of it’s former glory, and the territory it governed was not doing very well either. If they made the cut I really don’t see why Venice, Paris, Milan and Bruges wouldn’t, as they were some of the largest and richest human settlements on the planet at the time.
Al-Andalus had also been gone for hundreds of years, and by 1400, only the Emirate of Granada remained which would be very unlikely to make the list.
On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe.
While they were certainly not at the height of their proportionate wealth and influence, Europe in 1400 was still one of the most significantly densely populated areas on earth, making up roughly 25% of the world’s population, with China and India each being another 25%, and the rest of the world making up the last quarter.
They made plenty of technological innovations too, improvements on horse collars, ploughs and horseshoes all originated in Europe at the time and significantly improved the life of the working population. There were also major novel advances like eyeglasses, rudders, navigational tools, compound cranks, rolling mills, glass mirrors and a host of others.
Go back to the 800s-900s and you’d be more accurate.
If you look at pre-industrial societies, then Africa is on par or even ahead of Europe, examples would be the Umayyad Caliphate, Egypt, the Malian Empire, the Abyssinian Empire, the Kongo, and the Zanzibar Sultanate.
![[R*dittor] Why did Africa never develop? I'm not racist, just measuring skulls for science](https://lemmygrad.ml/pictrs/image/54ab8819-046a-4d8b-945b-a808d47f162d.jpeg){kind=link}
European colonialism.
Also is it true that Africa was underdeveloped vs European and Asian contemporaries prior to colonialism? I think there were some relatively substantial empires and we have perhaps fooled ourselves into thinking they were backward savages to justify colonial rule.
Development is a nebulous term. African societies weren’t building oceanic armadas or smelting steel but they were making huge advances in mathematics and physics. Some African societies were larger and wealthier than contemporary European ones. But the western yardstick is to measure the development of a society by how many bombs and iPhones it produces per second. Same goes for pre-columbus American civilizations. South American societies were engaged in full-scale hydrological engineering and advanced animal husbandry and selective agriculture exceeding European development. North American societies were governing massive tracts of land and creating self-sustaining food forest ecosystems.
And yea, Egypt was Black at one point. You can’t really hide multi-ton stone sphinxes
Pretty good chance they reached America before Columbus as well, but just didn’t commit genocide
Africa is not a monolith. Neither is development. North Africa was pretty advanced if I recall correctly with people like Mansa Musa and there were very significant cultural and scientific developments in the Muslim world at the time. I think that Europeans had better armaments, armor, naval technology and possibly construction ability. However that is a result of Europe having more easily attainable iron and coal deposits, constant war and England being an island. African animals are also more or less impossible to domesticate (except camels and maybe zebras, but not really) and this gave Europeans a leg up in agriculture and prioritized urban development which in turn leads to ideas spreading faster and more technological development. I think a lot of the gap was due to Europe having more cities, which also allowed for biological warfare. Parts of Africa were incredibly wealthy and developed and parts more or less operated off sustenance farming.
Great Britain is an Island, England is part of that island. Sorry but i gotta point this out when i see fit, cause all of the countries that make up Great Britain played a part in its history, and it’s not fair to leave them out.
I apologize to the tea addicts
No need to apologise. Im making the world a better place one american at a time.
I would hazard a guess that the relative smallness of Europe played a factor as well. Less distance between all the major city-centers meant easier dissemination of ideas and trade.
This line of argument makes it seem like there is a set amount of city centers when the amount of city centers is a result of dense populations and urbanisation. The thing you need to look at is why there was no urbanisation to the same extent. Europe was in no way unique in this regard, India, China, Mexico and the Andean societies were at a similar level in the early modern era.
Looking at urbanisation as the ultimate point of a society and development is also kind of a pitfall of traditional eurocentric history writing.
Yeah, although what’s odd is that Europeans traveled less because they didn’t make pilgrimages to Mecca
The answer is complicated for the reasons others have said, but I like to explain it this way:
Advanced, peaceful aliens arrive at Earth in 1400 CE. They want to set up relations with earth but they are used to dealing with planets that have one planetary government, society, etc (just like Star Trek). They don’t quite know how to deal with such a fractured and diverse planet.
So these aliens decide to only meet with leaders from selected societies. They don’t have specific criteria but are generally looking at a whole host of factors we might broadly call “development”: education, metallurgy, governmental forms, material output, health & sanitation systems, etc.
The aliens would almost certainly choose to meet with reps from at least China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, North and West Africa, parts of the Arab world, and Tenochtitlan. Europe, outside of Byzantium and Al-Andalus, would have been completely bypassed. On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe. If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
Outside of North Africa (and some part of West Africa)… I don’t know much about comparing the rest of the continent to Europe. But I really don’t think they were much behind if at all.
1400 is a good year to be in Europe because the plague just killed everybody so labor has historically high bargaining power.
I wouldn’t pick any of those other options either though.
I don’t know why people always conflate civilization with resources.
Europeans even before 1492 probably had slightly better lives than the average Indian/Chinese/MENA person, simply because Europe has more land and the climate is easy-mode as fuck. It’s just that they didn’t invent anything.
Roman accounts prove that Northern Europeans had fairly good quality of life, judging purely by the height difference (today it’s only 1-2 inches, but was much bigger back then)
If I could go back to year 1400 and live out an 80 year lifespan, purely for the sake of enjoyment and not for altering history, it’d be North America no contest. South America or Africa second picks
The Byzantines were very seriously on the decline by 1400. Constantinople was a shadow of it’s former glory, and the territory it governed was not doing very well either. If they made the cut I really don’t see why Venice, Paris, Milan and Bruges wouldn’t, as they were some of the largest and richest human settlements on the planet at the time.
Al-Andalus had also been gone for hundreds of years, and by 1400, only the Emirate of Granada remained which would be very unlikely to make the list.
While they were certainly not at the height of their proportionate wealth and influence, Europe in 1400 was still one of the most significantly densely populated areas on earth, making up roughly 25% of the world’s population, with China and India each being another 25%, and the rest of the world making up the last quarter.
They made plenty of technological innovations too, improvements on horse collars, ploughs and horseshoes all originated in Europe at the time and significantly improved the life of the working population. There were also major novel advances like eyeglasses, rudders, navigational tools, compound cranks, rolling mills, glass mirrors and a host of others.
Go back to the 800s-900s and you’d be more accurate.
If you look at pre-industrial societies, then Africa is on par or even ahead of Europe, examples would be the Umayyad Caliphate, Egypt, the Malian Empire, the Abyssinian Empire, the Kongo, and the Zanzibar Sultanate.
The Mercator projection has done a great disservice to people’s casual understanding of how big some African nations/empires truly were.
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